AMD News Archives

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver continues making much headway as the modern open-source AMD Gallium3D Linux graphics driver along with the GLAMOR library it depends upon for 2D acceleration, the 2D performance of the Linux desktop is still quite poor compared to the proprietary Catalyst driver.

For those anxious to see more AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU performance numbers under Linux besides what was shared in yesterday's AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: The Linux Introduction and AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux, here's some early result files available for comparison purposes.

For those Linux users that may have their hands on AMD Kaveri APUs early or are just looking for a new Catalyst Linux driver in hopes of new bug-fixes, AMD will release today their "AMD 4th Generation APU launch driver" to the public.

The latest Phoronix article covering AMD's latest graphics processors on Linux was earlier this article in pointing out the Radeon R9 270 is far from perfect. One of the big problems with any Radeon HD 7000 series or newer GPU is the poor 2D acceleration performance with the open-source Linux driver, but performance improvements are coming.

Yesterday saw a SteamOS Linux update that shipped a new AMD Catalyst Linux driver that reportedly worked much better for popular Steam Linux games. That driver update led Valve to officially support AMD (and Intel) graphics on SteamOS. For non-SteamOS Linux users, that new AMD driver update is available for other distributions.

A Red Hat employee working on Fedora QA has shared his experience using an AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card under Fedora with both the open-source RadeonSI driver and the closed-source Catalyst driver. For both drivers, the AMD R9 270 is "far from perfect" on Linux.

News on AMD's "Kaveri" APU is trickling out this week from CES, besides the facts that have long been known about this "Richland" APU successor. The launch date is officially next week and there will be Linux/open-source performance testing and results to follow.

Nearly one month after the last Catalyst 13.11 beta release, the Catalyst 13.12 Linux driver has finally surfaced. For ending out the year we have this last major AMD Catalyst Linux update with no new features but there are many bug-fixes.

As shown in our recent open-source GPU driver comparison, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver still has a long ways to mature to be more competitive against the R600g driver and the Catalyst binary driver. Fortunately, one of the major 3D performance-boosting features (HyperZ) appeared on Tuesday in mailing list patch form.